Welcome to the Jungle
For All Nails #155: Welcome to the Jungle by Walter R. Strapps (with thanks to Noel Maurer) ---- :Excerpts from the Prologue of :Total War - The History and Battles of the Global War, 1939-1948 (New York, November 1974) :Prologue ... One of the most surprising gaps in our knowledge of the Global War is the number of casualties, both military and civilian. Huge estimates have been cited by North American historians so often that they have taken on the status of facts, yet the estimates often fall apart under the most cursory analysis ... ... the reason behind the inflated figures of civilian deaths appears to be the manner in which the North American government allocated New Day aid. Aid was heavily weighted towards those countries which had suffered the most deaths during the war, providing an obvious incentive to inflate the estimates. For this reason, most serious scholars of the war now discount the estimates published by the North American government, although they are still widely cited, with the most recent case being Robert Sobel's recent popular history of North America ... ... The best estimate of the number of deaths due to the war is 25 to 30 million. This includes slightly more than 12 million soldiers, with the balance being civilian. The diversity and highly varying quality of the sources for these estimates make it impossible to properly determine which deaths were directly the result of military action, and which were indirect, such as the ensuing influenza epidemic ... ... As for the number of people suffering lasting injury due to the war, the over-all estimate is in the range of 55 to 60 million, both military and civilian. The final figure for total casualties is in the range of 80 to 90 million. While still staggering, this number is less than half of that reported in previous publications. Somewhere between four and five percent of the population of the Earth was killed or injured. Perhaps it would seem more shocking if the idea of 200 million casualties had not become so pervasive... ... the high figures for Mexican military casualties cited by North American historians seem to come from the "body counts" conducted by the Japanese and Australian armed forces during the early phases of the war. The Australian government began releasing the body count figures in 1944, when it became obvious that the Jeffersonist government in northern China (the so-called "United States of China") was not going to collapse as rapidly as the planners in Melbourne and Tokyo had antipated. Not only did the counts conflate Jeffersonist guerrillas and Mexican regulars, but the incentive for both local commanders and the authorities in Tokyo and Melbourne to inflate the numbers are obvious ... ... It was clear to Stanfield that the numbers cited by North American scholars of the number of Mexican combat casualties had to be incorrect. At its peak, the Mexican armed forces numbered only eight million individuals, and approximately twice that number served at some point during the war decade. Stanfield presumed that someone would have noticed had an entire quarter of the armed forces failed to return home, and over a third of the remainder returned wounded. Sampling medical records from the War Department's archives, Stanfield produced a maximum estimate of 4.2 million casualties killed or wounded during the war. Stanfield supported this estimate with the figure of the approximately 3.2 million Mexican soldiers authorized to wear "wound chevrons" between 1942 and 1950. Stanfield's figure is consistent with Corazon's estimate, derived from Veterans' Administration of Mexico records, that 2,876,452 men have received benefits as injured veterans of the Global War. Unfortunately, these figures cannot be used to back out the number of deaths, since not all wounded soldiers received benefits, and some of the soldiers who received wound chevrons later died of their injuries but were not registered as KIA. Nevertheless, subtracting Corazon's figures from the estimate of total casualties gives a upper bound of 1.4 million combat deaths in the Mexican army and navy. This figure is most assuredly inflated, partially because an estimate of the number of wounded from VAM records is too low, and partially because, as Corazon notes, "Many soldiers simply deserted at the end of the Global War, choosing to remain in Asia rather than return home." ---- All mistakes and confusing sentences are mine, in spite of editing assistance from Noel Maurer. (WRS) Forward to FAN #156 (November 1974): Rocket Queen. Return to For All Nails. Category: Global War